I am still battling with jet-lag and catching up on the sleep that grad school has deprived me of for the past 5 months. It’s good to be home. Good-ish. After dealing with reading depressing news about Italy’s imminent implosion for months, now I get to be immersed in national hysteria 24/7. Awesome!

The other day some CEO from a big supermarket chain was on TV saying how sales in supermarkets have gone down by 6% from last year, marking the worst decline in 50 years (really? I did not know our nonexistent supermarkets collected statistics back in the 1960). In particular, sales of red meat have gone down while sales of eggs and beans have gone up, or so he claimed, suggesting that either Italy is on the cusp of a vegetarian revolution or Italians are buckling up for a very lean Christmas. His voice adds to the chorus line of customers in taped in shops while lamenting the pitiful state of the nation, entrepreneurs whining that the government is not doing enough, our trade unions that are living in some Dickensian parallel industrial universe when our factories are all shutting down by the minute, homeowners impoverished by having to pay 150 euros in yearly property taxes on their first house (the horror!) and on top of all, our beloved politicians from the left and right doing what they do best: crying “Social Butchery” (Italian for “We don’t know what to do or say and would rather not do anything about this”) from the travelling shit show that is the Italian Parliament.

It appears to me that Italians firmly believe that if we are deep in the shit it is either none’s fault or someone else’s fault. Some enlightened citizens have been all too quick to blame the political class for the mess we’re in, as if those got where they are by self-appointment. None seems to have voted for these politicians (although, truth be told, we actually did not pick candidates but had to vote for a list in the last election thanks to our new electoral law, called ‘the pigsty‘ by the same MP that sponsored it). Some other enlightened citizens like to say Berlusconi is the cause of all of this, and while I tend to agree to some extent, I cannot ignore that Mr B. is the toxic by-product of our dis-functional politics (this in and of itself could be the subject of a longer post, some background). I am also not deluded enough to think that if our left-wing politicians could not win an election and keep a government together for more than 15 months when the alternative was a philandering clown marred in sexual and corruption scandals, it must be that they are also not very capable. Everyone seems to agree, however, that the Euro must be the cause of all this, to which I like to point out that if we still had our own currency it would probably be worth less than toilet paper right now. In fact, we had a major speculative crisis in 1992. Let me fish out some news article from those days (11/09/1992):

Global recession apart, Italy has two major problems: a massive public debt (much higher than that allowed by the Maastricht treaty) and uncompetitive labour costs. Source: here

It seems that twenty years have passed and nothing has changed. Our political class supposedly went through some major regeneration (on paper) but still nothing has changed.

I was slightly irked by all of this. It seems that a large portion of the Italian population is engaging in a national competition to stick their head into the sand while also waxing lyrical about how someone else is the cause of their misfortune. If this crisis has done anything is to hold a mirror to our faces and revealed us for what we have become: a nation that is morally and financially bankrupt.

To have a proof that we are morally bankrupt, it is enough to watch this video shot the day after some model citizens torched a whole Roma camp, after a rumor (later revealed to be false) was spread that a local teenager was raped by two Roma men. Pogrom, Italian style. Condemnation flew in from all sides (minus those scumbags that sit on the right-hand side of our Parliament and their sycophants) and this was archived as an anomalous episode. Until a couple of days later a neo-nazi shot two Senegalese street vendors dead in Florence. Clearly we seem to have found that someone else who is the cause for our problems.

It seems to me that we have become a society where none is ever at fault for things that go wrong, none is ever responsible, none ever wants to pick up the tab for fixing things, because our country is, in the end, not ours: it is some bottomless pit we can keep taking without putting things in. Suffice to say that Italy has the highest tax evasion rate in all of Western Europe, after Greece (YAY for Greece, for not making us look bad!):

Tax fraud is estimated to equal more than 20 percent of Italy’s annual economic output. From more than 41 million tax returns filed in 2010, fewer than 1 percent of Italians reported income greater than $135,000 (Washington Post)

According to the book “Soldi Rubati” taxes have gone up by 12.5 % in the past 30 years. If everyone paid taxes and we could cut payroll taxes, each salaried worker would get 275 euros per month (3300 euros in a year approx). Meanwhile:

There are 200,000 Italians who own luxury cars, but they’re telling the taxman that they have an annual income of between €20,000 and €50,000. One Italian claimed to have an income of €500 a year, but managed to run five Ferraris (source)

So where am I going with this? This debt crisis is not only a problem of economics and fiscal rigor, but a chance to turn ourselves around. We are either at the lowest point but looking up, or we are on an irreversible path towards global irrelevance and moral and financial impoverishment. Italian debt exploded in the 80s partly because of high global interest rates because of the various oil and global economic crises, partly because our political machine kept banking on macroeconomic tricks (currency devaluations etc…) to keep us going and beautify our deficit problems without having to come up with political solutions (for a more in-depth analysis, you can read here).

This crisis can be our way out of this vicious circle. If we got everyone to pay taxes (and apparently they have a game plan to do this) we might have a GDP that is 20% higher. There is clearly a way out. Now that we are done with the economic austerity, we need moral austerity. The economic and moral case is clear and the solutions are all there, all it takes is responsible politics.

(Bonus track: advert on tax evasion currently running on national TV. Hint if you do not speak Italian: it shows different kind of animal/plant parasites and ends with a social parasite.)